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Give it to me SIMPLE

B

brightfireofjoy

New member
I'm down with working through the wiki piece by piece and learning the lingo and the coding and taking my time. HOWEVER, I am also a hands on learner. I need to attempt things and look at examples as I read the wiki, or it just won't sink in.
SO:
In order to start my own game system in Hero Lab, I need to
1. Purchase Savage worlds
2. Load Savage Worlds
3. Choose the "Develop>Create New Game System..." menu option
4. Open the Authoring Kit Wiki and start reading..

Did I miss anything? I feel like I'm missing something Maybe the "now open this file to get started" part is somewhere deeper in the wiki and I haven't gotten there yet? Anyone want to break this down for me so I can get started learning? I'm feeling sort of ignorant/oblivious here.
 
1 Purchase Authoring Kit (Savage Worlds is written in the kit, but isn't a purchasable item as far as I understand.)

Steps 2 and 3 are no-op? Do they do anything? I don't think so.

Step 4 is make a copy of the "sample" game system and start modifying. Savage Worlds has a lot more crud you'd have to trim away unless your system used Savage World mechanics.

Rephrased:
You take the sample system, and you modify the XML to design the gui and internal layout. Then you extend it with .user files containing feats, classes, items, etc built on your layout/internals.

Be prepare to spend hundreds of hours (probably 200 to 300) to get it to a reasonable state. Also, consider a lot of the cool features like Pathfinder/D20 abstracted agent panels are not documented and getting information on how to do so is something I've been trying to find for months myself to no avail.
 
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In case you haven't gotten into the walkthrough for the Sample Data System, it takes what's essentially a skeleton of a fantasy RPG system (it's vaguely like D&D) and has you create Savage Worlds step by step (which is surprisingly useful because it includes steps such as adding a completely different attribute, or defense, system, while pulling out the old one). I'm personally stalled somewhere in the Character Sheet section because it's close to my final step before I can make the system I'm adapting useful to my players, and I'm a bit too much of a perfectionist in terms of getting things right.

:-P Although learn from my example... rather than implement Savage Worlds through the walkthrough, I started implementing a completely different game system using those pages as a guideline, and that means I'm still not done with it a year later. I sometimes think I should just power through the Savage Worlds conversion over a weekend to get a better overview.

The wiki is a bit incomplete, complete with redlinks (or whatever color they use for "this page doesn't exist yet"), but it does have a lot of information in it. With a proper lexer and parser, one could probably slot the code into an IDE and have a much easier time at it.
 
Just to plug my post over here, when doing a Find (or Find/Replace) in Notepad++, the file filter of config.cfg *.pkg definition.def *.1st *.core *.str *.aug *.dat will only search the data files, which can be very handy so you're not getting HLZ or HTML results, plus it will speed your search up by not searching the binary files.
 
If you use a mac, a unix system, or install grep you can use this script:

Code: 
grep -l "$1" *1st *aug *core *dat *def *str *user

I'm not sure how to change $1 for Windows .bat files.
 
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